Dynamo Zagreb
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
74
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Zagreb,
Croatia
Thursday, November 9, 2006
The hostel owner didn't know off hand, but as it happened, the woman she employed to cut the lawn was on the Croatian women's national team and knew all those things. And she was outside cutting the lawn. She turned off the mower and told us it started in half an hour.
I had only ten bucks in Croatian money left on me, but we heard that tickets were cheap. So we made a sacrifice and skipped eating to make the game and afford entry (I hadn't seen any ATMs around). The stadium was a fifteen minute walk away, and I spent the last of our money on the two cheapest tickets we could get. We went through security (no bottles this time) and climbed a seemingly endless spiral staircase to get to our seats. They weren't too bad; from the middle of the section, they looked out from behind one goal. Oh yeah, and this was where the local hooligans sat.
We took a seat to the left of these madmen, near a spot where a seat had earlier been melted into a puddle of plastic. They were fifteen feet from us. Dynamo! Zagreb! The game hadn't even started and they let out a warm up chant, with arms high in the air. They were almost entirely young and male and all standing. No "normal" fans sat near them, so because we did, our view was good because no one was in front of us. The supporters all stood in a cluster and every so often a pushing battle would erupt and then it was easy to see why the rest of the people in the stadium left them a wide berth.
Mostly though it was a lot of fun. These guys constantly cheered their team to the tune of classics like "Yellow Submarine" "Jesus Loves Me" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy." They made the tunes sound a lot tougher. At one moment in the first half, a select group of them stood up and let off a neo-Nazi chant but only a few (three score or so) from the rest of the supporters (seven hundred) and the greater crowd (possibly 2500 sitting in our stands) joined in. They all looked like young hooligans, and most of those louts wore hoods. But no one booed them down either.
Zagreb scored the first goal about twelve minutes into the game. It was scored off a free kick and I could see that it was going in about two seconds before it did, and I naturally let out a preparatory cheer. As I bellowed my approval I realized that it was echoing alone through the stadium for a few seconds, until the goal actually happened and then the stadium erupted.
It was really embarrassing but I chalk it up to cultural differences because that's what we do when our home teams have "opportunities" back home. The way they celebrate here is by letting off a flare (which are somehow smuggled into the stadium). It's kind of cool but after a moment a fresh breeze to blow the smoke away is really refreshing. Zagreb won 5-1.
Back at the hostel, we met some crazy characters. We got some great advice. One said that if you try to buy coke in Vienna you'll get ripped off, and another said that if you want a cool place to go and get high for a month, there is a certain beach in Columbia that's just about perfect. Always the adventurer, Bro went out until very late with these travelers, but I was exhausted so I went to bed.
